A Stone-Cold Masterpiece of Naive Art: Teresa Ottalo, ca. 1860

As a collector of naive art--particularly produced with letters or numbers--and as a person generally interested in naive and outsider (and art brut and letterist and found )art, I was astonished to find this spectacular work by Terea Ottalo (ca. 1800-1870). First of all, I make this to be about 200 lines long, and about 50 inches tall. The words are, well, minute.

I haven't yet found out anything about Ms. Ottalo, except some basic references of her affiliated "school" of art.

I do know that this, whatever it is, is a masterpiece.

And an unfortunately smudgy detail, such as it is--I cannot offhandedly find a good, clear, high resolution image of anything at all by Ms. Ottalo. This will have to do for now, but I think it gives a reasonable idea of the fineness of this work (found in Michek Thevoz's Art Brut, Skira, 1976)--this sample detail represents less than 10% of the overall image: